


Momentum

by Lisse



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Character Study, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-08-08
Updated: 2005-08-08
Packaged: 2017-12-25 07:17:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/950247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lisse/pseuds/Lisse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ginny can't look back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Momentum

Ginny is forward momentum. She scribbles disappearing words down to see what they do next and hexes first because that's what anyone with six older brothers would do. She never keeps her mouth shut or looks before she leaps, and sometimes that makes her the best in the Dueling Club and sometimes that makes her a raving bitch.

Nothing she can do about it now.

*

She doesn't fall in love with Harry the first time she sees him, or the second or third or fourth time. She idolizes the idea of him - the boy who can do amazing things without the need to bellow at the top of his lungs. The concept intrigues her, and for the first time, she tries to think before she acts.

But Ginny doesn't work that way. She secondthirdfourth-guesses herself until she's stumbling over her own thoughts and feet, and even when she tries to be introspective she's diving in headfirst anyway. Sometimes she wonders if anyone else would scribble words on paper just to see them disappear, without wondering where they go.

*

Hermione tells her to be herself. So Ginny leaps back into herself wholeheartedly, stops thinking before she speaks and moves and smiles.

But that doesn't make Harry notice her, and of course she doesn't want it to by then. Ginny stops idolizing Harry when she realizes that he is a human being and can speak without thinking - when she gets so blindingly furious with him that she can't even raise her voice, but can only tell him that maybe he ought to count his fucking blessings for once, you selfish arrogant little boy.

Not in so many words, of course.

*

And then she falls in love with him.

It creeps up on her and pounces, like the time she really saw Dean smile for the first time and the time she realized that Michael's uniform fit him oh-so-nicely. The story of her life is sudden realizations, speaking too soon and being irrationally angry for no good reason at all, because if she doesn't live from moment to moment nothing fits together the way it ought to.

She doesn't tell this to Harry, who doesn't need any more headlong rushes in his life. Instead she reaches out to him on whims, and she can't even hope that she's getting it right because that means hindsight, and hindsight means mistakes made of harsh words and quick tempers and parchment and ink.

*

Ginny understands the part of Harry that lives from day to day, who tries not to think ahead or behind out of desperate self-defense. There are times when she thinks that he'll come back and that part will be burned away - that a boy who lives from day to day can't survive against something that's decades and centuries old.

But there is nothing she can do except press on, racing headlong into her mistakes because sometimes they're good ones, and she knows that she's temperamental and mean and pushy. She thinks maybe she ought to rest and catch her breath again, like everyone else seems to.

And then she realizes she can't. She's running forward because it's all she knows, and she's forgotten how to stop.


End file.
